TEEME is an international doctoral programme in early modern studies funded by the European Union under the Erasmus Mundus scheme. It is structured around a unique collaboration between university-based researchers in the humanities and the cultural and creative sector in four EU countries (United Kingdom, Germany, Portugal, Czech Republic). We are looking for candidates with research projects that are comparative and interdisciplinary in conception, that bear a clear relation to present needs and debates, and that span at least two different linguistic, religious and/or ethnic cultures within Europe, or that relate one European with one non-European culture, in the period 1400 to 1700, or in later political or cultural uses and representations of early modern literature and history. By relating a broad understanding of ‘text' – in its original meaning of tissue, web or texture – to underlying ‘events' – the raw data of the past shaped into story by ‘weaving' or writing – all projects will combine a textual-literary with a cultural-historical strand.

Further information: www.teemeurope.eu

As a research student, you meet regularly with your supervisor, and have the opportunity to take part in informal reading groups and research seminars to which students, staff and visiting speakers contribute papers. You will also benefit from a series of research skills seminars that run in the spring term, which give students a chance to share the research expertise of staff and postdoctoral members of the department.
As a basis for advanced research, you must take the School and Faculty research methods programmes.

There are five research centres based in the School of English: the Centre for Modern Poetry; the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Research; the Centre for Studies in the Long Eighteenth Century; the Centre for Gender, Sexuality and Writing; and the Centre for Creative Writing. Two Faculty-based research centres have strong input from the School: the Centre for Medieval & Early Modern Studies, and the Centre for American Studies. Between them, these research centres organise many international conferences, symposia and workshops. The School also plays a pivotal role in the Kent Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, of which all graduates are associate members. The Institute hosts interdisciplinary conferences, colloquia, and other events, and establishes international links for all Kent graduates through its network with other advanced institutes worldwide.

Full details of staff research interests can be found on our website.

Professor David Ayers: Professor of Modernism and Critical Theory

Anglo-American Modernism; European Avant-Garde; literature and culture of the Americas; critical theory and philosophy; Russian Revolution and the Cold War. Recent publications include: Literary Theory: a reintroduction (2007).

Dr Jennie Batchelor: Reader in 18th-Century Studies

Eighteenth-century literature; gender; women's writing; fashion; visual and material culture; influence and intertextuality studies and 18th and early 19th-century periodicals and magazines. Recent publications include: Women and Material Culture, 1680-1830 (co-ed, 2007); The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House (co-ed, 2007); Women's Work: Labour, Gender and Authorship, 1750-1830 (2010).

Dr Stella Bolaki: Lecturer in American Literature

Multi-ethnic American literature (especially with a focus on migration/diaspora and transnational approaches); the Bildungsroman; gender theory; life writing and illness/disability; medical humanities. Recent publications include: Unsettling the Bildungsroman: Reading Contemporary Ethnic American Women's Fiction (2011); The Politics of Illness Narratives: Aesthetics, Identity, and Witnessing (forthcoming); Audre Lorde's Transatlantic Sisterhoods (co-ed, forthcoming).

Professor Peter Brown: Professor of Medieval English Literature

Chaucer and other late-medieval English writers; contextual aspects of medieval culture, including historiography; the visual arts; dreams and space. Recent publications include: A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture c1350-1500 (2007).

Dr Paddy Bullard: Lecturer in 18th-Century Studies

Eighteenth-century literature; the Enlightenment; intellectual history; rhetoric; politics and literature; bibliography and book history; textual criticism and editing. Recent publications include: Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric (2011).

Henry Claridge: Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature

American literature; realism in the novel; literary criticism and critical theory; American modernism (especially poetry and fiction). Recent publications include: Ernest Hemingway (2011); The American 1950s: Sources and Documents (ed, forthcoming).

Dr Rosanna Cox: Lecturer in Early Modern Studies

Milton; 16th and 17th-century literature and culture; gender; political writing; intellectual history. Recent publications include: Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture (co-ed, 2010).

Dr Vybarr Cregan-Reid: Lecturer in English and American Literature

Nineteenth-century literature and culture, especially representations of nature and the environment, time, history, water and gender; Hardy; Dickens; Forster; Kingsley; queer theory; sublimity; ecology and psychogeography.

Patricia Debney: Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing

Creative writing (prose poetry, short fiction); auto/biography; translation and adaptation; collaborative/interdisciplinary work; feminist theory; psychoanalytic theory. Recent publications include: Losing You (2007).

Dr Brian Dillon: AHRC Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts

The meeting points between fiction, scholarship and the essay or ‘creative non-fiction'; landscape; memory; autobiography; ruin aesthetics; travel writing; melancholia and the history of medicine; the relations of contemporary art and art writing to literary practice and research.

David Flusfeder: Lecturer in Creative Writing

Twentieth-century American and British fiction (also Borges, Cortázar and Büchner); modernism; and the literature and cinema of the 1960s and early 1970s. Recent publications include: The Pagan House (2007); A Film by Spencer Ludwig (2010).

Professor Abdulrazak Gurnah: Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures

Colonial and postcolonial discourse as they relate to African, Caribbean and Indian writing. Recent publications include: The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie (ed, 2007); The Last Gift (2011).

Professor David Herd: Professor of English

Twentieth-century poetry and poetics; American literature; the avant-garde; the politics of migration. Recent publications include: Enthusiast!: Essays on Modern American Literature (2007).

�Dr Sarah James: Lecturer in Medieval Literature

Late-medieval literary, visual and religious culture; vernacular theology; hagiography; manuscript studies.

Dr Andy Kesson: Lecturer in Early Modern Studies

Sixteenth and 17th-century literature; performance history, practice and theory; early modern actors, authors, publishers, readers and audience members; book history and print culture; prose fiction; pedagogy; gender studies; queer theory. Recent publications include: John Lyly and Early Modern Authorship (forthcoming); The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England (co-ed, forthcoming).

Professor Bernhard Klein: Professor of English

Early modern literature and culture; Irish studies; travel writing and cartography; maritime history and culture. Recent publications include: On the Uses of History in Recent Irish Writing (2007); Dido: Dramatisches Gedicht in Die Abteilungen (2011); Literature, Mapping and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain (co-ed, 2011).

Professor Donna Landry: Professor of English and American Literature

Eighteenth-century literature, culture, and empire; colonial discourse and postcolonial theory; Middle Eastern, especially Turkish, literature; Ottomanism and Enlightenment; travel writing; queer theory; animal studies; sea and desert studies; historical re-enactment. Recent publications include: Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture (2008); The Geopolitical Picturesque (forthcoming); Globetrotters: Riding to Far Horizons with Evliya Çelebi and Lady Anne Blunt (forthcoming).

Dr Ariane Mildenberg: Lecturer in English and American Literature

Modernist poetry; Wallace Stevens; Gertrude Stein; Virginia Woolf; the kinship of method and concern between phenomenology and modernist literature and art; the interaction of contemporary philosophy with theology; the relationship between modernism and postcolonial writing; translation of Scandinavian poetry. Recent publications include: Phenomenology, Modernism and Beyond (co-ed, 2010).

Professor Jan Montefiore: Professor of English and American Literature

Twentieth-century literature; Auden; Kipling; H D; Sylvia Townsend Warner; contemporary poetry; feminist critical theory; the intersections of writing and politics. Recent publications include: Rudyard Kipling (2007).

Dr Will Norman: Lecturer in North American Literature

Twentieth-century American literature and culture; European and American modernism; Vladimir Nabokov; models of high and low culture in the mid-20th century; critical theory; American crime fiction and transatlantic studies. Recent publications include: Transitional Nabokov (co-author, 2009).

Dr Marion O'Connor: Reader in English and American Literature

Theatrical reconstructions and dramatic revivals; iconography; drama as historiography; censorship. Recent publications include: The Witch (Oxford University Press Collected Works of Thomas Middleton) (co-ed, 2007); Shakespeare Reproduced: The text in history and ideology (co-ed, 2008); The Court Beggar and The Queen's Exchange (The Collected Works of Richard Brome) (ed, 2010).

Dr Alex Padamsee: Lecturer in English and American Literature

Postcolonial literature and theory; South Asian literatures; British writing on India; race, empire and colonisation in 19th and 20th-century British literature; partition and trauma studies.

Dr Ryan Perry: Lecturer in Medieval Literature

The axis between literary criticism and codicological analysis; the application of new critical approaches to manuscript study, borrowing from disciplines such as anthropology and focusing on the situation of texts within their synchronic material contexts.

Dr Catherine Richardson: Reader in Renaissance Studies

Early modern drama, literature and cultural history; relation between textual and material culture, especially clothing and the household; oral and literate cultures. Recent publications include: William Dugdale, Historian, 1605-1686: His Life, his Writings and His County (co-ed, 2009); Everyday Objects: medieval and early modern material culture and its meanings (co-ed, 2010); Making Household: The account book of Sir Thomas Puckering of Warwick and London (co-ed, 2011).

Professor Caroline Rooney: Professor of African and Middle Eastern Studies

African and Middle Eastern literature, especially Zimbabwean and Egyptian; colonial discourse and postcolonial theory; the Arab Spring; liberation literature and theory; terror and the postcolonial; global youth cultures, especially hip-hop and spoken word; contemporary visual arts; sea and desert studies; queer theory; psychoanalysis. Recent publications include: Kipling and Beyond: Patriotism, Globalisation and Postcolonialism (co-ed, 2010).

Amy Sackville: Lecturer in Creative Writing

An interest in the novel as a form and its development since the early 20th century from modern to postmodern, and in the interrelation of language and the world; creative writing; modernism. Recent publications include: The Still Point (2010).

Simon Smith: Lecturer in Creative Writing

Creative writing; poetry in translation, Latin and French; poetry reviewing; experimental fiction; critical theory; theory of creative writing. Recent publications include: Browning Variations (2009); London Bridge (2010).

Dr David Stirrup: Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature

First nations and Native American literature; 20th-century North American literature; the American and Canadian Midwest; border studies. Recent publications include Louise Erdrich (2010); Literature of the Americas (co-author, forthcoming); Tribal Fantasies: Native Americans in the European Imaginary, 1900-2010 (co-author, forthcoming).

Scarlett Thomas: Reader in English and Creative Writing

Creative writing; writing and science; mathematics and fiction; the contemporary novel. Recent publications include: The End of Mr. Y (2007); Our Tragic Universe (2010).

Dr Cathy Waters: Reader in 19th-Century Studies

Victorian literature and culture, especially fiction and journalism; Dickens; Sala; George Eliot; literature and gender. Recent publications include: Commodity Culture in Dickens's ‘Household Words': The Social Life of Goods (2008); Victorian Turns, Neovictorian Returns: Essays on Fiction and Culture (co-ed, 2008); Imagining Italy: Victorian Writers and Travellers (co-author, 2010); A Library of Essays on Charles Dickens (forthcoming).

Dr Sarah Wood: Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature

Creative critical writing; 19th and 20th-century poetry and fiction, especially Robert Browning and Elizabeth Bowen; writing and visual art; literary theory; deconstruction, especially Derrida; psychoanalysis; continental philosophy. Recent publications include: The Blue Guitar (co-author, 2007); Derrida's ‘Writing and Difference': A Reader's Guide (2009).

Further information:

• School website
• School staff profiles

Admissions enquiries

T: +44 (0)1227 827272
E: information@kent.ac.uk

Subject enquiries English

School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NX, UK
T: +44 (0)1227 823054
E: english-office@kent.ac.uk

Creative Writing

Scarlett Thomas
School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NX, UK
T: +44 (0)1227 827290
E: s.thomas@kent.ac.uk

Postcolonial Studies

Dr Caroline Rooney
School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NX, UK
T: +44 (0)1227 827948
E: c.r.rooney@kent.ac.uk

Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Dr Catherine Richardson
School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NX, UK
T: +44 (0)1227 824656
E: c.t.richardson@kent.ac.uk

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